As part of its newly enhanced IxChariot suite, Ixia introduced IxChariot 8.0 and IxChariot Pro solutions that allow customers to meet the rising demand for operational efficiency and to leverage the agility offered by new networking technologies.

IxChariot provides IT teams the ability to more easily devise and conduct end-to-end network assessments that simulate real-world applications and predict device, system and network performance under realistic load conditions – all from a web browser.

As network deployment models evolve and cloud computing and virtualization lead to data center consolidation, enterprises are increasingly embarking on these high-profile initiatives and cannot afford to overlook network performance variables. Traditional views of networks do not deliver the scalability and reliability needed to predict and optimize performance in enterprise networks that are becoming increasingly borderless. The latest release of IxChariot enables enterprise network architecture teams and IT operations professionals to measure and optimize real end-to-end application performance during network design, staging and live operations.

New networking technologies, including virtualization, cloud computing, mobility, unified communications and rich media services, offer significant IT benefits; however, they also add to network complexity and can cause performance degradation.

To drive greater network efficiency and flexibility and to simplify network assessment testing across LANs, WANs, virtualized environments and mobile infrastructures, IxChariot v8.0 provides customers with benefits including:

- Comprehensive assessment of enterprise network performance bottlenecks via IxChariot server and endpoints, which can be distributed throughout multiple data centers and remote office locations. IxChariot endpoints have a very small software footprint and are supported on dozens of operating systems, personal computing and mobile devices.

- Real world traffic flows with Ixia’s Application Library, which emulates authentic enterprise application behavior to determine the impact of the network’s design on application performance.

- Flexible deployment into the network via virtualized platforms, as well as the ability to simultaneously be accessible from anywhere within the network, through a new HTML5 web interface.

- Support for all major computing platforms, including popular platforms such as Windows, iOS, Android and Linux servers, with a small, non-intrusive endpoint agent used to conduct the end-to-end network assessments.

IxChariot Pro provides an operational solution for distributed production network and field use that enables customers to additionally:

- Combine centralized web commands with potentially thousands of software and hardware probes deployed across physical and virtual data centers.

- Conduct automated real-time network assessment and active monitoring.

- Access enhanced reporting, alerts to deviations in SLA compliance and the ability to test without changing the current infrastructure setup.